Fungi Frame of Mind
Mushrooms are magical for cooking and health
Mushrooms are the fruit of fungi, the equivalent of the apple on the apple tree if stranger in appearance. The mushroom caps bear the spores that allow for reproduction of the species, though mushrooms are not plants. Because they can’t photosynthesize, and they depend on moisture to grow, they’re typically found in shady and moist environments.
They’re a little weird, in other words. Yet in Asia for millennia, mushrooms such as shiitake have been used for medicinal purposes. In Europe, species such as the cremini and the truffle have had a long and tasty history in cooking.
In Ventura County today, mushrooms’ delectable taste, healthful properties and medicinal use are inspiring intrepid locals to go into the mushroom business—foraging wild fungi and propagating cultivated mushrooms. That means “eating local” can extend to the mushrooms in your risotto and mixed sautéed veggies. (Besides their umami quality, mushrooms are low-cal and offer vitamins and minerals.)
Medicinals Trending
Fred Ellrott of F & F Farms in Moorpark grows shiitake (Lentinula edodes) and oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), which he sells at the Downtown Ventura and Thousand Oaks certified farmers’ markets. An avocado farmer who started the mushroom business in 2007, Ellrott says the market for gourmet mushrooms has stabilized in recent years, with lots of repeat customers. He doesn’t forecast explosive growth, but he does see a lot of new interest in medicinal mushrooms, which are edible mushrooms with health-enhancing powers.
“[Anecdotally] the shiitake is one of the better medicinal mushrooms out there, and we point that out to customers, if they’re not already familiar with the research,” Ellrott says.
Studies show that shiitake mushrooms may have the potential to provide therapeutic effects against some cancers and may improve the immune system.
“Lion’s mane seems to be the current darling right now among the medicinal mushrooms. We get a lot of questions about it,” he adds.
Lion’s mane (aka Hericium erinaceus) is one of the most prized wild mushrooms Omar Uribe forages for in Ventura County and the Santa Barbara area. He collects wild mushrooms to make medicinal mushroom tinctures and found an especially large lion’s mane this past winter on Creek Road in Ojai.
“It had just rained and I was looking up in the trees [where this species is often found] and saying to myself, ‘Where are the mushrooms? Because I know they’re here somewhere,’” he recalls. “I looked up and, whoa, there it is, right over the road. It was a mission to get it with the cars flying by and the tree growing over the road,” says Uribe, who was raised in Ojai and trained as a chef at one of the country’s most celebrated restaurants, Chez Panisse in Berkeley.
Lion’s mane mushrooms are anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidative and have properties that stimulate the immune system. This may mean that they could offer benefits to our immune systems, and be used in treating cancer, diabetes, fatigue, and may help with anxiety, cognitive function and depression, according to Dr. Mendel Friedman, Western Regional Research Center, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, who has published research articles on mushrooms’ health benefits.
While studies on the health benefits of mushrooms look promising, more human trials are needed to validate the early findings, notes Friedman.
Identifiable by their long spines, lion’s mane mushrooms have no toxic mimicking “look-alike,” like some mushrooms used in cooking, such as chanterelles. Button mushrooms commonly seen in supermarkets have three wild look-alikes, including the deadly “destroying angel.”
“You have to be brave to forage for mushrooms,” says Alex Moore, age 28, whose day job is at a foreign relations think tank in Los Angeles. On weekends, he helps his brother, Preston, at their new gourmet mushroom producing business named Valley of the Moon Mushrooms. Ventura County recently certified the Oak View business, which started selling in May at the Ojai Certified Farmers’ Market.
That Strange Appeal
If we have a warm fall, the brothers will still have the brownish-gray Mediterranean oyster mushrooms (their most popular), and they’ll have grey dove oysters. Likely, they say, they’ll have the “unique and wonderful” smaller pink oyster.
“I don’t get as much money for that strain, but just to see the way people smile when they see it is worth it,” Preston Moore says. “They will say: ‘Wow, is that an art piece?’ ‘Is that real?’”
This fall, also look for shiitake and the speckled gray dove. The blue dove oyster mushroom will be back closer to winter. Customers often ask about medicinal mushrooms such as maitake (Japanese for dancing mushroom) and lion’s mane. They plan to start growing both, as well as almond mushrooms, which look a little like button mushrooms.
Although Alex Moore works in the city on weekdays, he comes home on weekends to help. “I’m very passionate about this work,” he says. “I lot of that is a really wonderful environment, working with people I love and grew up with, and creating a success we can share with our community.”
For Preston Moore, age 26, who takes the lead role in the business, the strangeness of fungi is part of the appeal. On a tour of the small but complex operation that appears to me like the work of a hobbyist whose obsession has just recently escaped the garage, he looks every inch a young farmer in his boots, heavy clothes and suspenders, while speaking like a scientist of “mycorrhizal networks,” “fruiting bodies” and “spore prints.” He shows me a small room devoted to inoculation, the injection of spores in solution in large syringes into raw grain mixtures in sterilized jars, as if in a lab.
And he takes me into the mist room, its shelves stocked with different species, stacks of mushroom books and large sealed syringes loaded with solutions of mycelium species.
Moore’s interest began in college, in a class on evolutionary sociobiology, when he learned that fungal networks in forests are key to distributing nutrients and sugars between tree species. He continued his research after college, when not working in the county clerk’s office in Ventura, and began inoculating jars of grains with mushroom spores.
“My first attempts were complete failures,” the younger Moore admits. “I tried four different [growing] styles in 2015, and I was a little down for a while, trying to figure out what I did wrong. But I figured it out, and when I did it the next time I had so many mushrooms I didn’t know what to do with them. I reached a point where I was giving away five, 10, 15 or 20 pounds of mushrooms a week, and I realized we needed to start selling them.”
The brothers have been successful at the Ojai farmers’ market, but experienced a setback due to June’s searing heat wave. The heat overheated and prematurely cooked dozens of bags of inoculated mushrooms. Weeks of production were lost.
“That’s a part of the mushroom business,” Moore says. “In other parts of the country, they talk about how to maintain production in the winter, when it’s snowing outside. In this part of the country we have to find a way to adapt to heat waves.”
At the farmers’ market, Moore brings a block of young mushrooms to show how the fungi grow. Shoppers, especially children, like to stop and talk about the unusual ones.
“I don’t know if because it’s the freakiest thing out there or the coolest thing, but the kids are fascinated,” he says.
Drink Your Fungi
Other innovations with fungi are found in the air or out the back door. Pascal Bauder, a Los Angeles–based author and “...
Wild Mushroom and Pea Salad
This is a fresh, crunchy salad with lots of tasty, golden mushrooms in it. You can use any blue cheese – I like to...
Fettuccine Pasta with Butternut Squash and Mushrooms
Biondi says this is more of a Northern Italian dish and can be made vegan by using spaghetti instead of egg pasta,...
Barbecued Mushrooms with Rosemary, Garlic and Soy Butter
You need firm, sturdy fungi to stand up to the heat of the charcoal and develop a crust while staying juicy inside...
Communities Near You
Related Stories & Recipes
Drink Your Fungi
Wild Mushroom and Pea Salad
Fettuccine Pasta with Butternut Squash and Mushrooms
Barbecued Mushrooms with Rosemary, Garlic and Soy Butter
Spicy Saucy Sichuan Mushroom Chow Mein Stir Fry
